Forward looking: Activity-level budgets numerator

Current

Proposed

IATI: For each forward year - Total number of activities that count as CPA containing an activity budgetFSS: For each forward year - Number of activities with forward spending figures

Discussion

Comparing the value of forward-looking budgets against historical spend is not a measure of transparency. It confounds changes to future spending levels, absence of projections for projects still to be agreed and transparency of information. For example if a donor has only one activity in a country, spending $100m in the base year and with a budget of $10m in the current year, the current method would score 10%. But in fact the donor is fully transparent on that activity and so should score 100%.

A more accurate assessment of forward-looking data is to count how many activities that will still be active in each forward year have a budget recorded for that year.

This approach means that it is not possible to calculate a single score for both activity and aggregate data in the same forward year. From a country planning perspective activity-level forward-looking data is more relevant than aggregated data. Thus the indicator should score aggregate data ONLY where a publisher does not report ANY activity forward data in that year.